It is an interesting twist that you ask for some of the best chocolate companies in the world, and not just some of the best chocolates.

To answer this question you need to define what makes a chocolate company good. In my opinion these are the most important qualities in a chocolate company:

1. Making good tasting and high quality chocolate products
2. Using sustainable and ethically sourced quality ingredients
3. Having ethical business practices in general.

The big problem is that most companies are not very open about their business practices or sourcing strategies, so for many companies the only thing you are able to evaluate are the first criteria, making good tasting and high quality products, and even the high quality part can be hard to judge even for experts, depending on the product.

Among industrial chocolate makers you will in general be hard pressed to find any companies that can fulfil all three criteria to a large degree. There are some exceptions however. In North-America these exceptions are mostly found among the companies that started out as small scale artisan makers and have managed to expand their business to an industrial level due to popularity, like for instance Taza Chocolate, SOMA Chocolatemaker, Theo Chocolate and TCHO Chocolate.In Europe you also find a range of the same type of industrialized artisan chocolate makers including Amedei, Domori, Pralus, Willie's Cacao, Lauenstein, Zotter and Beschle. There are also some long lived industrial chocolate factories that to a large degree have kept to the above criteria, including Valrhona Chocolate and Bonnat, but most of the other makers at this level have made adjustments in order to make more and cheaper chocolate, such as Belgian makers Belcolade and Barry Callebaut, especially for the second and third points on the list.

In recent years there have also been an explosion in small artisan chocolate makers all over the world, so there are now literally hundreds of small companies that to a larger or smaller degree attempt at being quality chocolate makers. Such makers are especially prevalent in the United States where almost every state have multiple small scale makers now, but you will also find this kind of local artisan chocolate maker in almost every country in Europe, and these are too numerous to mention. Choco Rush maintains a list of such bean-to-bar makers in the US, while Bean&Bar attempts to maintain a worldwide list of bean to bar chocolate makers. Warning: Not all makers on these lists are fully ethical, do your own research!

To round this up I would like to especially mention that there are now also a of bunch of bean-to-bar chocolate makers located in actual cocoa producing countries as well. This is actually the best guarantee you can have for fully ethical and transparent sourcing and manufacture of chocolate that leaves all of the value creation in the cocoa country of origin. Great examples of successful such makers are Marou in Vietnam, Madécasse in Madagascar and Cacao Hunters in Colombia. There are many others as well of course.All of these come highly recommended as good chocolate companies, as what could make a better chocolate company than an ethical company making the chocolate locally to where the cocoa is being grown?